The Koboi Project is a photo-performative instantiation of identity across the discontinuities of a multi-generational diasporic experience.
Image after George Gallaway’s expression “the raised hand of shame covered in blood!” Please see below –
Image: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-black-power-salute-that-rocked-the-world-50-years-ago/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-vetoes-gaza-war-un-resolution-that-doesnt-stress-israeli-right-to-self-defense/
https://humnews.pk/world/us-vetoes-security-council-demand-for-ceasefire/
According to Peter Adams of the BBC, an estimated 2.2 million people are now crammed into the southern two-thirds of the Gaza Strip. Conditions are dire, with many ill, injured, and traumatized by the indiscriminate Israeli bombing campaign, in the name of eviscerating Hamas. This terrible situation has been exacerbated by winter rains and flooding. Further, Adams notes that Israeli authorities have been urging these desperate Gazans to move into an even smaller “safe area” called al-Mawasi on the coast, near the Egyptian border. Al-Mawasi is estimated to be only about 2.5km wide by 4km (2.5 miles) long. In a sinister but wholly predictable development, the IDF’s Arabic social media is reported to have messaged that al-Mawasi would provide “the appropriate conditions to protect your loved ones.” In light of Israel’s promise to resume its assault on Hamas at the end of the present ceasefire, the implication that other than this tiny sliver of land, the rest of Gaza is unsafe, raises the terrifying spectre of an impending massacre. (Update : The Ceasefire ended on the 30th Nov and Isreal has indeed resumed its assault with a vengance).
I am a Jaffna Tamil and, this relentless heading and corralling of the population of Gaza into progressively smaller ‘safe areas’, brings memories of my people being forced into that narrow seaside strip in Mullivaikkal in the Mullaitivu District, towards the end of the Fourth Elam War in 2009. This area was declared a “no fire zone” to protect civilians during this final battle in the Government of Sri Lanka’s relentless war to eradicate the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE). However, in the aftermath of this battle the Government is accused of indiscriminately, even deliberately, shelling this “safe zone” and the LTTE, in turn, of using the desperate civilians as human shields. The UN has estimated a civilian death toll of 40,000 in the last days of this war but a UN internal inquiry has acknowledged that the number that up to 70,000 deaths were possible. However, when World Bank spreadsheets for 2010 are set against Statistical Handbook Numbers for 2007, the difference suggests that 101,748 people are unaccounted for in the Mullaitivu District.
I fear that Israel might be on the way to applying the Sri Lanka Genocide Model as a solution to the conflict in Gaza. As of December 4th, (UPDATED), 15,523 have been killed, 41,316 injured and 6,800 are missing. Of the 15,000 who have been killed so far, 6,600 children and 4,300 are women. Israeli attacks are as follows. Those of us who live in nations that continue to stand with Israel regardless of the illegality and the inhumanity of its actions must impress upon our leaders that, regardless of how Israel’s negotiations develop vis-a-vis Hamas (Update : The Ceasefire ended on the 30th Nov and Isreal has indeed resumed its assault with a vengance), this genocide must not continue. What happened at the end of the Elam War should not be allowed to happen in Gaza.
Image: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67518819
Image: https://mandalaprojects.com/ice/ice-cases/lanka-climate.htm
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/frances-harrison/one-hundred-thousand-peop_b_2306136.html
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/live-updates-temporary-cease-fire-expires-israel-hamas-105297622
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker
This is the Palestinian flag used in 1938 during the revolt against the British Mandate. As evident in the design, Christians and Muslims were represented equally in this movement. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), formed in 1964, was also very much a secular resistance movement and remains so to this day. It was only after the Iranian revolution in the 1980s, that Islamic groups like Hezbollah, and Hamas began to take the lead in the Palestinian resistance. Even today Christian Palestinians identify with their fellow Muslim Palestinians in the struggle against occupation. Framing the struggle in religious terms, as a struggle between Jews and Muslims is at best a misunderstanding, and at worst, it serves to divide Palestinian identity, rendering Palestinians more vulnerable to Israeli subjugation.
Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_flags
At the dawn of the humanist epoch, the great pioneer of spatial, physical, and psychological realism, Giotto di Bondone, painted a fresco cycle at the Arena Chapel, in Padua, which which presents the story of Christ. Arguably, the perspectival acuity, the modeling of masses, and the emotional expressionism that would come to characterize the Italian Renaissance found its first consolidated realization in this celebrated cycle. Descending from the anagogical abstractions of Medieval art, to engage in an empathetic somatic and psychic sensibility of Humanism, the panels of Giotto’s cycle must have given contemporary viewers an unprecedented impression of the Biblical narrative as being couched in the moral and ethical realities of earthly life.
One striking image here is ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’ (detail) which represents King Herod’s men slaughtering all male children, 2 years old and below, in Bethlehem. As the slaughter ensues, a collection of lifeless children builds into a central heap, as if Giotto were presenting both the physical evidence and the statistical data of the event, all in one visualization. Although the representation of the mothers in this image is thought to have received contemporaneous criticism for being impassive, subdued, numb, and expressionless, I find the stunned stillness of this image more profound and moving than the later more expressive version in Lower Church, Assisi, also believed to be from the artist’s hand.
Not unlike Herod, whose indiscriminate slaughter was based on the uncertainty about the identity of the infant King of the Jews, whom he feared would usurp him one day; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to justify his collateral slaughter of innocents based on their geolocational inseparability from the constituents of his own dreaded nemesis – Hamas. UPDATE: The number of Palestinian children slaughtered in Gaza stands at 8,663 (this figure is an estimate as of December 19).
See Also
Le Massacre des Innocents
Grace in the Face of Suffering
The Advance of Maleficence
Witness to Slaughter
Image: https://gallerix.org/storeroom/146947004/N/2469/
Image: https://betweentwocities.com/2017/03/19/giottos-two-views-of-the-massacre-of-the-innocents/
https://www.thehistoryofart.org/giotto/massacre-of-the-innocents/
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-trackerI
European settler colonialism was initiated in the 15th century, on the premise of a divinely ordained white supremacy1, and the founding of Israel in the land of the Palestinians during the British Mandate in the 20th Century was the last significant instantiation of this mode of ethnopolitical domination, albeit it might be seen as a species of settler colonialism all of its own.2 The current British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, removed Parliamentary Private Secretary at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Paul Bristow from his post for rebelling against the government’s position on the ongoing war in Gaza. Bristow had expressed his support for a ceasefire and called on the PM to push for an end to fighting between Israel and Hamas. That Sunak, who rose to his high station in the British polity from Indian origins, and who should, therefore, be alert to the inhumanity of subjugation, would be complicit in Israel’s genocidal colonial expansion in the 21st century, is a shame unto him, his family, and their origins.
https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/israel-hebrew/why-israel-isnt-a-settler-colonial-state/
The Massacre of Innocents is a 17th-century masterpiece by Nicolas Poussin that crystalizes, in the portrayal of a single imminent action, an eternal image of child murder. According to the Bible, King Herod the Ascalonite, who was a vassal of Imperial Rome in Judea, feared the advent of a new ‘King of the Jews.’ Unable to ascertain the precise location or age of the new-born Jesus Christ, he decreed the collateral slaughter of all the babies under 2 years old in and around Bethlehem (Matthew 2:1). This ancient specter of child murder has returned to haunt us today, both in the debunked (updated December 20) Israeli claim that HAMAS beheaded 40 babies in its fearsome raid on October 7th and, more concretely, in the number of dead Gazan children, laid waste in Israel’s fearful response.
UPDATE: The number of Palestinian children slaughtered stands at 8,663 (this figure is an estimate as of December 19).
See also:
Grace in the Face of Suffering
The Advance of Maleficence
Witness to Slaughter
https://bible.oremus.org/?passage=Matthew%202:16&version=nrsv
https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2023/hamas-behaded-babies-israel-unconfirmed-reports-spread/
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker
The United States was the only member of the Security Council to veto a draft resolution put forward by Brazil at the UN Security Council calling for a humanitarian pause in the assault on Gaza. This vote, which took place on 18 Oct 2023 followed an earlier resolution that was voted against by France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, for failing to condemn the HAMAS attack on Israel. Blocking this second, amended, call for a cessation of hostilities, which in fact specifically condemned “the heinous terrorist attacks by Hamas,” enables, Israel to continue its slaughter of innocent Palestinians without the legal restraint of UN censure. CNN reports that the US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield criticized the resolution for failing to mention Israel’s right to self-defense, thereby perpetuating the Israeli conflation of the semantics of ‘attack’ and ‘defense.’ She also explained that the US wanted more time to let its on-the-ground diplomacy “play out.” It seems that the United States is enabling, even promoting, what Raz Segal has called a textbook case of genocide. Shame!
26. 10 2003 update: 7,028 people killed by air strikes in the Gaza Strip.
Image https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/18/europe/us-veto-security-council-israel-gaza-war-intl/index.html
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-death-toll-names-killed-released-biden-questions
In a moving and stunningly clarifying interview with Chris Hedges, Middle East scholar, Norman Finkelstein gives a historical and personal lesson about the morality of oppression. He locates the meaning of terrorism and the targeting of civilians within the context of genocide and ethnic cleansing, he refers to the Slave Revolts of Nat Turner and John Brown, as well as his own parent’s experiences of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and of Nazi concentration camps.
He contextualizes the acts of terror committed against civilians by HAMAS in terms of the traumatic spiritual and psychological conditions, the despondency and rage, of living in occupied Gaza. He cites Fredric Douglas and W. E, B. Du Bois (on John Brown’s killing of civilians) and, particularly, William Lloyd Garrison (on the killing of innocents in the Nat Turner Rebellion), all three of whom refused to condemn the brutal rebellions against the humiliations, degradations, and physical assaults of slavery. He also quotes his mother, whom he holds to be a deeply moral person, about her thoughts about the millions of German civilians who died in the Allied terror bombings of World War II. She said, “Our feeling was if we’re going to die, we’re going to take some of them with us.”
Describing Gaza as a “Concentration Camp” Finkelstein declares, “You want me to apply moral categories, condemn? … I’ll describe my reaction. I will acknowledge by a dictionary definition that it constituted a very large atrocity. That’s a dictionary definition, and it’s accurate. However, when you want me to apply a moral category to what happened, you lose me … I won’t do it!”
26. 10 2003 update: 7,028 people killed by air strikes in the Gaza Strip.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-death-toll-names-killed-released-biden-questions
The Koboi Project 
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